Sometimes a single scene or even image can come to dominate a story. It can be a revelation, Such as with the Sixth Sense, it can be a moment of sacrifice as in The Wrath Of Khan, or even something unscripted such as “you’re going to need a bigger boat.” from Jaws. Last year, 2011 now, I experience such a moment and it continues to haunt my thoughts and nibbles at my creative urges, hoping one day to become the theme to a story.
During 2011 I had the pleasure of seeing two productions of “The Tempest’ by Williams Shakespeare. The first, my only live Shakespeare to dat, was a stage performance at the Old Globe Theater in Balboa Park, and the second was the film version starring Helen Mirren, both very good and engaging production of the story about love, monsters, magic and revenge.
Act five Scene one Prospero the wizard consult with his servant the spirit Ariel. Ariel and Prospero have trapped Prospero’s enemies in a grove of trees and some are being tormented with phantasmal vision and dangerous, while the weep at their predicament. Ariel informs Prospero that these men, who have stolen his title, lands, and exiled him and his infant daughter to die at see are so distraught with unseen terrors that if Prospero beheld them he would know his feelings would be sympathetic . Prospero questions this and Ariel responds, “Mine would, sir, were I human.” Prospero taken aback by the admission from the inhuman Ariel, realizes the futility of revenge and starts to redeem himself and in the process his enemies as well.
“Were I human” continues to echo in my mind. The though that a creature of inhuman emotions, something very alien, having greater sympathy for human plight than the supposed main character is, for me, a very powerful image. It’s at heart a concept very much at home in science-fiction, and yet one absent from the SF interpretation of “The Tempest”, “Forbidden Planet.” (Not faulting “Forbidden Planet,” they were playing along different lines.)
I keeping think on what it mean to be a person who consumed with your own obsessions that an alien understands your fellow people better than you do. One day, who knows maybe soon, but perhaps distant I find a plot to make this theme a story for my own prose.
I look forward to that epiphany.
